Singleness

Resumen
El amor y las relaciones de pareja en siglo XXI se han visto permeadas por las transformaciones contemporáneas: el individualismo, la lógica de mercado y el feminismo, entre muchas otras. Con base en lo anterior, en este ensayo se busca mostrar el tipo de experiencias –o no experiencias– a las cuales se someten las personas trans en términos amorosos. Se enfatizará especialmente en la realidad de las trans femeninas dentro de un mercado amoroso regido por la heteronormatividad, donde los actores sociales circulan en un mercado en el que la competencia se da en condiciones de desigualdad. Para la construcción del ensayo se utilizaron diversas fuentes primarias y secundarias, literarias y no literarias. Entre las fuentes primarias destaca la realización de entrevistas semi estructuradas a trans femenimas y trans masculinos. El ensayo describe cómo las personas trans viven y explican su soltería, ahondando en las causas sociales que actualmente subyacen a ella y propone que la identidad de las trans femeninas no está considerada dentro del imaginario del amor romántico, por lo que sus experiencias respecto a este tipo de amor son reducidas y/o negadas.

Palabras clave: soltería, amor, modernidad, trans, trans femeninas, mercado amoroso.








Abstract
Love and relationships in the 21st century have been influenced by modernity and what this it entails: individualism, market logic, feminism, among many others.  Based on this, we want to show the type of experiences –or non-experiences– that trans people are subjected in terms of love. It will be specially emphasized the reality of female trans within a loving market governed by heteronormativity, where social actors circulate in a market in which they compete in unequal conditions. For this essay, several primary and secondary sources, as well as literary and non-literary sources, were used. Among the primary sources, semi-structured interviews to female and male trans are highlighted. This work describes how trans people live and explain their singleness, delving into the social causes of it, and proposes that trans female identity is not considered within the romantic love imaginary, thus their experiences relative to this love type are reduced and/or denied.

Keywords:  singleness, love, modernity, trans, trans woman, loving market.

The United States is unquestionably a pro-marriage society. The observation that marriage is a more desirable status than singlehood has been trumpeted in recent popular books including The Case for Marriage (Waite & Gallagher, 2000), Creating a Life (Hewlett, 2002), and What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us (Crittenden, 2000) and has guided the implementation of pro-marriage social policies including “covenant marriage,” and economic and tax policies that favor married couples (e.g. Nock, Wright, & Sanchez, 2002). Popular “reality” television shows, situation comedies, and films owe a posthumous screenwriter’s credit to Jane Austen, as their final scenes often fade to a dreamily enamored heterosexual couple at (or on their way to) the altar (Wetzstein, 2001).
Few observers would question that cultural images, public policies, and personal attitudes elevate the status and value of heterosexual marriage relative to single life in the United States today. DePaulo and Morris take this observation one important leap further. They argue that pervasive and largely uncontested support for the Ideology of Marriage and Family has quietly generated a more pernicious yet barely acknowledged phenomenon called “singlism,” or prejudice and discrimination targeted against the unmarried. The persistence of singlism, they argue, is evident in multiple studies documenting negative attitudes towards unmarried persons (e.g., Morris, DePaulo, Hertel, & Ritter, 2004). Of even greater concern to DePaulo and Morris is that uncontested beliefs about the supremacy of marriage as a cultural ideal are perpetuated (unintentionally) by the social scientific community. Social science research often begins with the unacknowledged and uncontested assumption that a comparison between “married” versus “unmarried” persons is a meaningful and important contrast. Similarities between the two groups
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are often ignored, and differences (particularly those differences where the single fare worse than the married) are attributed to the less desirable aspects of singlehood or, worse yet, to personal deficiencies of the single persons themselves.
DePaulo and Morris provide a timely, compelling, and exciting springboard for further investigating the ways that civil (marital) status shapes human experience. Rather than critiquing their argument, we hope to push it in new directions by evaluating more rigorously the claim that single persons are the target of stigmatization. To do so, we will first revisit classic and contemporary conceptualizations of stigma, and will evaluate the extent to which singles both meet and depart from the criteria set forth by Goffman (1963) and others. Second, we will challenge the notion that prejudicial beliefs toward single persons are sufficient evidence that single persons are stigmatized. Rather, we propose that single persons themselves must perceive that they are the targets of mistreatment (regardless of their attribution for it) to demonstrate stigmatization. Third, we conduct empirical analyses, based on the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study, to evaluate whether unmarried persons differ from married persons in their perceptions that they have been the target of interpersonal and institutional discrimination. Fourth, we explore possible explanations for our empirical finding that single people report interpersonal mistreatment but not institutional discrimination. We propose that singles are caught in a “cultural lag” (Ogburn, 1922) between macrosocial changes that encourage and sustain singlehood as a desirable option, and slow-to-change cultural ideals that still elevate marriage as the ideal state. Pro-marriage ideology (and consequently, single stigma) will persist until scholars and laypersons (a) recognize and question the privileges afforded to married persons, (b) acknowledge that problematic aspects of marriage and family life are indicative of “public issues” rather than “private troubles” (Mills, 1959), and (c) investigate more fully the
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adaptive and creative ways that unmarried persons construct their own unique sets of “family” relationships. Finally, we propose that the development of “singleness studies” as a field of academic inquiry may be an important step in chipping away at singlism both in science and society.

Resumen: las fuentes demográficas presentan algunos sesgos de información en cuanto al registro del trabajo femenino, dado que en los censos de población se omitieron las ocupaciones de muchas mujeres. Varios autores han explicado este fenómeno como un descuido por parte de los empadronadores que privilegiaron las actividades de los jefes de familia varones. Debido a los silencios que presentan estos documentos, utilizamos la triangulación de fuentes con la finalidad de corroborar si efectivamente estas mujeres se encontraban desempleadas u ocultaron sus empleos por alguna razón. En este artículo esbozamos una alternativa para abordar el problema de la omisión de empleo de las mujeres solteras, al tomar como base el Censo de la Ciudad de México de 1790. Para ello, identificamos cinco aspectos que resaltan los motivos por los que se omitieron sus ocupaciones: la situación doméstica, los empleos ocultos, las estrategias de subsistencia, las condiciones de salud y las conductas delictivas. Argumentamos que el empleo femenino no fue omitido al azar por los empadronadores sino que es el reflejo de la percepción de la mujer en la sociedad colonial, ya que muchas de ellas trabajaban y su empleo les garantizaba su independencia económica. Por tal motivo, resaltamos que deben explorarse las condiciones de las ocupaciones no registradas porque la imagen del trabajo femenino estará incompleta si no advertimos este fenómeno.

Abstract: demographic sources present some information gaps regarding the registration of female work because the occupations of many women were omitted in the population censuses. Several authors have explained this phenomenon as an oversight on the part of the census-takers, who privileged the activities of male heads of households. Due to the silences presented by these documents, we used the triangulation of sources, to corroborate whether these women were unemployed or hid their jobs for some reason. In this article we propose an alternative to address the problem of the omission of employment of single women, based on the Census of Mexico City of 1790. For this, we identify five aspects that highlight the reason their occupations were omitted: domestic situation, hidden jobs, subsistence strategies, health conditions, and criminal behaviors. We argue that female employment was not randomly omitted by the census-takers, but rather is the reflection of the perception of women in colonial society, since many of them worked and their employment guaranteed their economic independence. For this reason, we emphasize that the conditions of unregistered occupations should be explored, because the image of female work will be incomplete if we do not take note of this phenomenon.